What does the US Department of Education do?
brookings.edu
brookings.edu
To steelman the case for its removal:
1. Do not reward poor performance (American's are ~40th best in the world for education, despite spending the most)
2. Remove incumbent bureaucrats who may have agendas
3. Giving this responsibility to the states lets education be more closely aligned with state values
Downsides:
1. People tend to dislike change, especially for change's sake
2. Duplication (each state will have to do things that could be done just once if done nationally)
3. Potential loss of shared curriculum (having some common background in knowledge, culture, reading) helps understanding and communication
Some of us don't want education to be state-based. We want the entire country to have strong public education and funding with specifics handled by locally elected supervisory boards. We don't want people like MTG or Boebart or Abbot or DeSantis dictating it: banning books, whitewashing American history, deciding who gets funding and firing professors, and sabotaging the entire system with voucher garbage to benefit their rich private school buddies. Just because I disagree with, say, Kentucky, doesn't mean I want them to suffer third world education and destroy a generation of outcomes in their state.
(3) is a downside to us. Nobody in politics is debating the specifics of how children learn algebra or what drives outcomes or how to prompt reading. They're debating the "values" if trans kids get to go to the bathroom or participate in extracurriculars. If we call it the Gulf of Mexico or America. If you're even allowed to teach about civil rights/history, in places like Florida. Education systems should be higher to keep it out of reach of tiny men, in an independent agency that has no interest in values and has oversight from an amortized political view (legislation).
Your other bullet points don't really make sense. (1) isn't related to states, it's related to teaching policy, and it's policy that states currently control. (2) is not changed by this at all, it just moves the bureaucrat to a smaller region and near guaranteeing that they're led by a biased, agenda-driven politician (purple states are rare).
They can always choose to stop being Machiavellian about children.
Then change the constitution, which delegated education to the states: https://www.findlaw.com/education/curriculum-standards-schoo...
Federal meddling in it is legally dubious, and mostly happens via financial extortion - extract taxes from states, then return them so long as the states do what the federal govt. wants. Unfortunately the Supreme Court has been extremely negligent in enforcing limits on federal power [1].
[1] It infamously determined that a farmer growing wheat on his own land, to feed his own animals, counts as inter-state commerce, and can therefore be regulated by the federal government, on the tortured logic that such an action could eventually indirectly affect inter-state commerce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
But my point is that the OP predisposes that the ideal is that states do everything.
Furthermore, Europe and the USA are so radically different culturally and politically that the comparison isn't particularly helpful.
Yes, but the EU-level synchronization of the individual school systems is minimal, mostly limited to establishing degree equivalences and mutual recognition. The differences between the EU and USA don't make this example - of perfectly functioning education systems in small countries - any less relevant.
>1. Do not reward poor performance (American's are ~40th best in the world for education, despite spending the most)
State based education agencies are no more or less capable of rewarding poor performance.
>2. Remove incumbent bureaucrats who may have agendas
State bureaucrats absolutely have agendas, and their agendas can be far more radical than national agendas. See Southern states requiring that the Bible be included in the curriculum - that's something that could only happen at the state level.
>3. Giving this responsibility to the states lets education be more closely aligned with state values
What "state values" should education be aligned with, that cannot be met by a national standard for curriculum?
I can't think of a good reason why, say, science or history must be taught differently in one state versus another, other than a desire to impose religious or political bias into the curriculum, which I don't consider valid, if the goal of education is to educate rather than indoctrinate.